November 14, 2003

Digging the hat

fedora_logo.pngI thought I'd have one last try at finding a well-behaved linux distribution before I junk the old laptop and move over to the Mac. Alex had good things to say about the recently-released Fedora Core 1, and since his graphics card is similar to mine, I thought I'd give it a go.

I've had three basic problems with recent distributions (such as Debian, Knoppix, Libranet, and Redhat):

The Fedora installation was the slick experience I've come to expect from Redhat (which I wish Debian would adopt ... I hear the new Debian installer is available for testing now, about 2 years too late). One bonus is that the installation allowed me to configure my screen size - 1400x1050 - which many of the other distributions fail to list. 1400x1050 isn't that unusual, surely?

After a bit of fiddling to make Fedora boot (I already have Debian on the laptop, and didn't want to mess up that installation), I was up and running. The first thing I noticed was that my text console wasn't running at 1400x1050. The second thing I noticed was that X most definitely was. Great! My graphics card works. Unfortunately, sub-pixel rendering wasn't, leading to some unpleasant strobing of the text, which is hard on the eyes.

The first few setup screens looked good. My sound card was detected correctly. After completing setup, I was able to login. The default X desktop was well-presented. I headed straight for the Display program in System Settings, but I couldn't find any way to enable sub-pixel rendering. I finally found the option under Fonts in the Preferences.

I tried to get networking working. Unfortunately, whenever I clicked on "Activate" to get my wireless card working, I got "Cannot get driver information: Operation not supported". I figured out that by deleting the network card, then re-adding it but specifically selecting the "wavelan_cs", I could get up and running.

The only thing I can't get running is - no surprises - suspend and resume. But then I'm convinced the only reliable way to do that is in hardware anyway :-(

Other than that, Fedora is fast. I don't know if it's because of the improved support for my graphics card, because I haven't installed all my usual cruft on the machine yet, or because the Fedora binaries are optimised for Pentium-class machines (Debian is still built for 386 compatibility). Either way, it flies along.

Posted by savs at November 14, 2003 6:48 PM